From one a year to several hundred: how the number of political prisoners in Russia has skyrocketed under Vladimir Putin

Russia’s political prisoners now number in the hundreds — and represent only the cases that human rights activists have been able to get a handle on. Russia did not come to imprison such a large number of its own people for their views and beliefs all at once. There were only a few political prisoners in the early years of Putin’s rule, and each new case of political persecution was a cause célèbre at the time. As part of 30 Years Before, a special project of the Memorial Human Rights Defence Centre, Verstka has charted how political crackdowns have evolved in Russia over the last twenty-five years.

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How many political prisoners are there in Russia right now?

Since 1999, Russian human rights activists have declared about 1,500 people political prisoners. Some people arrested by the Russian authorities at different times have been accorded this status twice.

In the summer of 2024, Russia, the U. S., and Europe carried out the largest prisoner swap in recent history. Russia released ten political prisoners, and in return, the Kremlin welcomed home an assortment of its own spies, assassins, and cyberfraudsters. Despite the swap’s significance, it only slightly lowered the number of people on the list of the country’s political prisoners.

Currently, there are at least 768 political prisoners serving time in Russia’s penal colonies, awaiting trial in pretrial detention centres or under house arrest, working as forced labourers, or undergoing compulsory medical treatment.

Human rights activists note that this figure only partly reflects the magnitude of the crackdown in Russia, and the actual number of political prisoners is several times higher. Memorial cannot promptly evaluate each case of persecution due to the lengthy process of analysis, lack of information, and the large number of criminal cases against politically active Russians.

How are political prisoners identified?

Until 2008, lists of political prisoners were compiled by volunteers, in particular from the Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners. Memorial’s human rights activists joined the process in 2008.

Currently, the human rights project Memorial: Support for Political Prisoners is the only reputable Russian nonprofit organisation that assigns the status of «political prisoner» and «persecuted for political reasons» to Russians. The decision as to whether to consider a particular individual’s criminal case as politically motivated is made by a council of fifteen human rights activists whose names are withheld for safety reasons.

Until 2022, the council was part of Memorial per se, but after that organisation was disbanded by the Russian Supreme Court at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office, human rights activists founded Memorial: Support for Political Prisoners. This independent entity now makes all decisions on the status of political prisoners.

The human rights activists are guided by the criteria set out in the «Guidelines for the Definition of a Political Prisoner.» This guide was developed and adopted by human rights activists from several Eastern European countries.

Russian human rights defenders argue that a case can be made for politically motivated criminal prosecution when it is clear that law enforcement agencies and judicial authorities have acted on the basis of political motives that would be unacceptable in a democratic society. They single out two such motives: if state officials launch criminal prosecutions in order to maintain or consolidate state power, and if the criminal prosecution is meant to force the person to alter or halt their activism.

Political prisoner status cannot be granted in several cases — if a person has been prosecuted for committing violence against another person (except in cases of self-defence or extreme necessity), and also if they are prosecuted for committing a hate crime against a person or property, or for inciting violence on national, ethnic, racial, religious or other grounds.

«After the aggression against Ukraine began in 2014 and Crimea was occupied, the atmosphere in the country steadily deteriorated, and the crackdowns have only increased since then,» explains Sergei Davidis, co-chair of the Memorial Human Rights Defence Centre and head of Memorial: Support for Political Prisoners. «After the full-scale aggression began, the number of political prisoners skyrocketed. And although we have been trying to adapt and have increased the speed with which we research criminal cases, we are still lagging behind the facts on the ground, because our work involves studying the case files and making a reasoned judgment.»

What are lists of political prisoners for?

One of the goals of lists of political prisoners is to attract public attention in Russia and abroad, human rights activists say. «When there is a clearly documented and substantiated assessment of politically motivated persecution, it benefits the prisoner,» explains Davidis.

Inmates identified as political prisoners receive more letters, and people are more willing to donate money to support them. Also, as Memorial notes, «any form of public attention reduces the likelihood of the most gross violations of prisoners’ rights and lawlessness towards them in penal colonies.»

«There may be direct orders to violate someone’s rights, of course, but this is far from always the case,» says Davidis. «There is, rather, an overall atmosphere of impunity and irresponsibility [in the Russian penitentiary system]. In such circumstances, public attention is a mitigating factor.»

The noughties: Putin’s first political prisoners

The number of political prisoners in Russia grows every year. Whereas the people assigned this status numbered in the dozens in the noughties, they have numbered in the hundreds in recent years.

There was only one political prisoner in Russia when FSB director Vladimir Putin was appointed the country’s prime minister in 1999.

Igor Sutyagin, an expert on disarmament and arms control, worked at the Institute of US and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was arrested on charges of high treason (per Article 275 of the Criminal Code) and sentenced to fifteen years in a high-security penal colony. In 2010, President Dmitry Medvedev pardoned Sutyagin, and authorities exchanged him and three other prisoners for Russian spies arrested in the United States.

In the next three years, three more people were identified as political prisoners. One of them was Valentin Danilov, a physicist from Novosibirsk. Like Sutyagin, he was accused of high treason. The FSB alleged that Danilov had disclosed classified information to China and embezzled 466,000 rubles from his employer, Krasnoyarsk State Technical University. Danilov was sentenced to fourteen years in a high-security penal colony. He was released on parole in 2012.

By 2024, dozens of people would be prosecuted every year on charges of high treason, espionage, and disclosure of top-secret information. As Verstka recently estimated, 121 people were convicted on such charges in 2023 alone. The main challenge to human rights defenders in such cases is that police investigators fail to disclose the details of the charges, and journalists and the general public are not allowed to attend the trials.

2003 – 2006: the Yukos case

In the late nineties and early noughties, every case of unwarranted political persecution turned into a high-profile public event. Journalists covered each case in detail, and rank-and-file Russians were openly outraged, Memorial recalls.

The so-called Yukos case is regarded as a watershed. In its wake, political prisoners became «the order of the day» in Russia. The businessman and political activist Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the most prominent figure charged in the case.

Fifteen co-owners and high-ranking employees of the major Russian oil company Yukos, including Khodorkovsky, were accused of embezzlement, tax evasion, money laundering, fraud, robbery, and murder between 2003 and 2006 and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. The defendants were recognised as political prisoners. According to Russian human rights activists, the Russian state went after Yukos employees because Khodorkovsky, the company’s co-owner, had been financing opposition parties. The European Court of Human Rights, with which the defendants in the Yukos case later filed complaints, ruled that the defendants had been deprived of their right to a fair trial. And yet, the ECHR also concluded that the oil company had violated tax laws and engaged in business practices that had never been legal in Russia.

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2004 – 2013: Manezhnaya Square, Bolotnaya Square, National Bolsheviks and environmental activists

The first major wave of political crackdowns was the persecution of the National Bolshevik Party and The Other Russia movement, led by the political activist and writer Eduard Limonov. Memorial assigned the status of political prisoners to twenty-two National Bolsheviks who were charged with criminal offences between 2004 and 2012. According to Memorial, the Russian government had «grossly violated the law» when it banned the National Bolshevik Party, and the people implicated in the 2010 Manezhnaya Square riots had actually been imprisoned because of their affiliation with the opposition movement The Other Russia.

Memorial always underscores that when it identifies a person as a political prisoner that does not mean that it supports their political views. The status is accorded those people who, in the opinion of the human rights activists, have been prosecuted groundlessly, that is, because the Russian leadership sees these people as challengers and a threat to the regime.

After the arrests of the National Bolsheviks, a wave of crackdowns swept up people who had attended the major opposition protest rallies in 2012. As a result of the Bolotnaya Square case, twenty-two people were identified as political prisoners. They were accused of engaging in rioting and assaulting police officers.

A year later, the Russian authorities launched the largest criminal case against environmental activists in modern Russian history. Thirty Greenpeace activists from sixteen countries were charged in the so-called Arctic Sunrise case. They had sailed on their own ship to the Murmansk Region, where they had tried to board a Gazprom drilling platform in order to stop oil production in the Arctic. The Russian authorities arrested the activists and charged them with piracy and disorderly conduct. All thirty defendants were recognised as political prisoners by Memorial. Subsequently, the persecution of the country’s environmentalists would become commonplace for the Russian authorities.

2012 – 2024: Persecution of Hizb-ut-Tahrir and Jehovah’s Witnesses

During Putin’s rule, groups of believers not belonging to Russia’s «official» religious organisations have been vigorously persecuted. As of August 2024, the list of political prisoners includes 431 people who have been persecuted for their religious beliefs. All of these people are either already serving prison sentences or are awaiting trial.

In 2012 – 2013, hundreds of Muslims accused of being adherents of the religious and political movement Hizb-ut-Tahrir were subjected to crackdowns. The organisation was deemed a terrorist organisation and banned in Russia in 2003, but wholescale persecution of its alleged members kicked off only ten years later. The persecution intensified after 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea. More than 120 Crimean Muslims accused by the Russian authorities of having ties with the banned movement have been charged with terrorism.

Human rights activists have argued that supporters of Hizb-ut-Tahrir cannot be accused of terrorism. They have never masterminded or perpetrated any actual terrorist attacks, and their religious idea is a utopian socio-religious project. According to Memorial’s experts, years of persecution of Muslims has generated the stereotype in Russian society that Islam equals extremism and terrorism.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are another large group of religious believers who came to be prosecuted in the twenty-teens. This popular Christian movement, which originated in the United States, has millions of followers worldwide, but is banned in some countries with undemocratic regimes. Russia’s Jehovah’s Witnesses were targeted for mass persecution in the wake of a 2017 Russian Supreme Court ruling that the movement’s head office was «extremist.» Subsequently, law enforcement agencies set about surveilling the heads of the organisation’s branches in different regions. Believers who continued to gather together and pray were prosecuted for «involvement in an extremist community.»

Annexed Crimea has accounted for the largest number of cases, human rights activists claim. According to Memorial: Support for Political Prisoners, Crimean believers account for almost five percent of all Jehovah’s Witnesses persecuted by the Russian state, although Crimea’s residents make up no more than two percent of Russia’s total population. When the peninsula was part of Ukraine, Jehovah’s Witnesses were not persecuted there, but after annexation at least 8,000 believers became potential «extremists,» according to UN estimates.

2017 – 2024: Antifascists, protest rallies in Moscow, Navalny’s arrest, and persecution of his supporters

The number of political prisoners in Russia began to grow rapidly seven years ago. Until then, the scale of political crackdowns in Russia was indicated by a few dozen new political prisoners each year, but in 2017, more than a hundred new political prisoners emerged. (It is true that the status itself was often assigned by human rights activists only a year or two later, when they finished analysing the case files.) In 2017, the Russian authorities cracked down on several socio-religious and political groups: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims accused by the security forces of associating with Hizb-ut-Tahrir and Tablighi Jamaat, antifascists and anarchists (the Network case), and supporters of the political activist Vyacheslav Maltsev (the Artpodgotovka case).

Since 2017, the number of new political prisoners per year in Russia has never fallen below one hundred and twenty. The highest number of new political prisoners in recent Russian history — 213 — was recorded in 2019. (Human rights activists have not yet been able to analyse all the cases of political repression that occurred between 2022 and 2024.)

In 2019, Russian law enforcers were particularly diligent in bringing criminal cases against Jehovah’s Witnesses and Hizb-ut-Tahrir supporters. The year also saw large protests organised in Moscow by supporters of the opposition politician Alexei Navalny. In the wake of these rallies, law enforcement authorities opened dozens of criminal cases on charges of rioting, and Memorial recognised twenty-one people as political prisoners.

Two years later, the Russian authorities launched a large-scale campaign of persecution against Navalny’s supporters which is still ongoing. Some were charged with «involvement in an extremist community,» others with «financing extremist activities.» Some of them managed to leave Russia before they were formally charged, but many were arrested, including journalists who had covered Navalny’s trials. Memorial recognised sixty Navalny supporters as political prisoners between 2021 and 2024. Three of them were included in the August 2024 prisoner swap between the West and Russia.

Navalny himself, also designated a political prisoner, was detained by the Russian authorities in 2021 when he returned to Russia from Germany, where he had undergone medical treatment after being poisoned with a toxic nerve agent. Navalny was arrested at the airport in Moscow and never released again. On 16 February 2024, he died in Penal Colony No. 3 (aka Polar Wolf) in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District. The politician’s family and supporters believe that Navalny was murdered.

Trends in 2022 – 2024: more female political prisoners

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian authorities continued to crack down on groups they had been targeting before the war: religious believers, people with oppositional views, and protesters. New categories have been added to these, however. In the last two and a half years, the Russian authorities have been vigorously persecuting anti-war Russians, as well as independent bloggers and journalists who report on the military actions in Ukraine or their consequences.

Amidst the war, there have been more and more women political prisoners. Their percentage has been growing over the last six years. In 2015 – 2017, they constituted no more than three percent of all political prisoners in Russia; in 2018 – 2019, no more than eleven percent; and in 2020 – 2021, fifteen percent. In 2022 – 2023, the percentage of women amongst political prisoners rose to sixteen or seventeen percent. As of July 2024, however, women accounted for twenty-seven percent of all Russian political prisoners.

«The Russian state used to take the patriarchal stance that, all other things being equal, it treated women leniently,» says Sergei Davidis. «So, before war, there were only a few women political prisoners, and each case was unique. With the outbreak of full-scale war, as women began to play an active role in the anti-war resistance, the state no longer cared about who spoke out against the war. The state had other things than sentimentality to worry about. It raised the bar of what it required from society and lowered the bar as to who it could persecute.»

New challenges: are deserters and people who set fire to military recruitment centres political prisoners?

The war with Ukraine has presented Russian society and human rights activists with a large number of new topics for discussion. Should people who sabotage railroad lines [in order to hinder trains transporting materiel] be considered political prisoners? What about those who set fire to military recruitment centres? And those who desert from the army? How can we recognise Ukrainian nationals in the occupied territories as political prisoners if we do not even know their names?

Davidis explains that in addition to cases of high treason and espionage, which are classified, there are a large number of situations in which the details of the case are not known at all. It is difficult for human rights activists to consider granting the status of political prisoner in cases of terrorism, sabotage and desertion. Lawyers are afraid to share case files, and the state conceals the particulars. In most cases, the verdicts are not made public, but if they are, they contain scant details, thus leaving it unclear what motivated the defendant and whether their prosecution was baseless.

«If a person is a conscientious objector [and has been prosecuted], we recognise such people as political prisoners. We now have somewhere around eight such people on our list,» says Davidis. «But most of the thousands of people who are prosecuted plead guilty, and the courts thus hear their cases without examining the prosecution’s evidence. So, we either don’t know their motives, or, if we do, it transpires that these motives had nothing to do with their convictions.»

According to Davidis, the state generally has the right to pass laws obliging its citizens to perform military service, but «in circumstances in which the state is waging a war of aggression, things are certainly more complicated.»

«Of course, refusal to perform lawful military service and refusal to be involved in an aggressive war are different things,» he says. «If a person testifies that he didn’t want to do military service because he didn’t want to be involved in a war of aggression, we will deem him a political prisoner, of course. But what we usually see is that a person [prosecuted for desertion or AWOL] says in court that he just wanted to be at home and see his girlfriend, for example. Perhaps he gives such explanations to avoid making things worse for himself, but we cannot know for sure.»

Criminal prosecution for arson attacks on military facilities is also an ambiguous situation.

«If a person is charged with deliberately damaging property, unfortunately, this charge is commensurate. We can sympathise with these people, we can understand their motives for protesting, but the state justifiably qualifies their action and has the right to prosecute them,» explains Davidis. «It is another matter when they are unreasonably accused of terrorism. Terrorism necessarily involves the desire to terrify the populace, but why should the populace be terrified if someone clumsily set fire to the shack housing the village military training facility? In such circumstances, we believe that the charges are unwarranted, and we recognise such people as political prisoners.»

The prosecution of Ukrainian nationals in the occupied territories is another grey zone. According to Davidis, «all civilian hostages can be considered political prisoners,» but Russian human rights activists most often do not even know their names. «They are all held incommunicado and this, of course, makes our information about them very sketchy. If we are talking about Ukrainian nationals who are prosecuted, for example, on charges of terrorism, sabotage, or espionage, then, if we know the details, we analyse their cases in the same way as we do the cases of Russian nationals.»

Forecasting the future: the scale of the crackdowns will not decrease

There will not be fewer political prisoners in Russia in the coming years, says Davidis.

«The repressive apparatus is such a considerable component of the system which has evolved in Russia that even in the absence of special political decisions, its scale is still growing — simply because there are a million [officials] who don’t know how to do otherwise and who need to vindicate their regime by saying that they are protecting the state from internal enemies,» says the human rights activist.

Currently, the state of human rights in Russia is better than in Belarus, for example, but worse than in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. This could change if public dissent against the regime grows.

«We should realise that the crackdown in Belarus has been much more extensive not because Lukashenka is so awful and Putin is so sweet, but because Lukashenka faced a much bigger challenge,» argues Davidis. «If tens of millions of people had taken to the streets in Russia, the powers that be [there] would have faced a comparable challenge. The current volume of dissent in Russia allows Putin to control the situation by employing the amount of repression he currently employs. But if the situation changes in some way, if the scope of the protests increases, the level of repression will undoubtedly increase as well, because this regime is ready and willing to undertake crackdowns of any size to preserve itself.»

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